Post navigation

Daily Mail Fail: Moldovan Squatters

Last week the Daily Mail reported last week that so-called ‘Moldovan Squatters’ have occupied a house in London, subsequently picked up by the Telegraph and the Evening Standard.

The ‘Moldovan squatters’ were discovered on 8 January, in a house belonging to Mr and Mrs Mason:

The house was built in 1970 and Mrs Mason’s parents, Betty and Bill, moved in the following year when she was nine. Bill died in 2003 and Betty moved into a care home in 2009. The house was rented out to pay the costs.

Betty passed away in December 2010 and the two-year tenancy came to an end in May last year, after which Mrs Mason decided to sell up.

So far, so good. The sale came to a halt on January 8th:

An offer of £248,500 was accepted last month but the deal ground to a halt on January 8 when the Masons, who have no children and live 12 miles away in Epping, Essex, learned the Moldovans – four adults and four children – had moved in.

And the occupants claimed to be Tenants:

The owners were also met by a woman clutching a ‘tenancy agreement’ when they arrived.

‘She was saying she would call the police,’ said Mrs Mason. ‘So we thought let’s call the police and resolve the matter. But they couldn’t do anything.’ Officers examined the occupants’ documents, which stated they let the property from a woman called Sharon Wright from December 28 and paid £2,000.

The occupants allowed the Masons to examine the House:

They were unable to contact the woman and refused to pass her mobile number to the Masons, who were allowed inside briefly to examine the house, which had been left unfurnished.

But this is not a police matter:

Police told them they were powerless to act as it was a civil matter.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘Squatting in an empty property remains a civil matter and the owners were advised accordingly.’

The Masons are distraught, understandably:

‘We’re not eating, we’re not sleeping properly. I have had to inform my buyer that the house is now occupied by squatters and we cannot sell it to her.

and it may take 8 months to regain possession:

Lawyers have advised the couple that they face a legal process that could take up to eight months and cost them thousands of pounds.

While I have huge sympathy for Mr and Mrs Mason, there are more FAILS here than you get in an integrity check for MPs’ expenses in the last Parliament.

Taking a deep breath:

1 – This is not squatting. If it was squatting they would not have waved a ‘tenancy agreement’ in front of the people knocking on the door.

2 – On the other hand this *is* probably part of the Mail’s continuing ‘demonise the foreigners’ campaign. Whether Moldovans should be here or not is a different matter.

3 – That ‘up to eight months’ eviction time is roughly how long it can take to eject a legal tenant who has decided to stay while not paying the rent – the process is tortuous. Repossession of an unlawfully occupied property by someone who wasn’t a tenant, in contrast, usually takes a small matter of weeks.

That lawyer deserves the sack.

4 – If they were real squatters they would not be brandishing a ‘Tenancy Agreement”. In that case, all the owner has to do is prove that the Tenancy Agreement is a fake and that they own the property, and they can move straight to a repossession hearing at the local Court.

5 – There is no need for the sale to fall through; all that was required was appropriate advice as to how long the process would take, and the buyers would be likely to stay.

6 – The Telegraph has picked up the Daily Mail story without substantial correction.

7 – In this case a criminal offence has been committed, and the police could have picked that up.

The potential offence is that the ‘tenants’, who have to leave the property, are the victims of a con-artist to the tune of £2000, which are the upfront costs for a tenancy on this type of property – a month’s rent, a ‘deposit’, and potentially some ‘admin’ charges.

I can think of no better way to stop this type of scam than by catching the conmen who are organising it. They should be the target of the Daily Mail, not their victims.

It is possible that the 8 occupants of the house had faked up their own Tenancy Agreement, but in that case it remains a police matter (faking a Tenancy Agreement and fraud), and they would be exposed just as quickly by the appropriate police intervention.

What happened?

To wrap it up – The Epping Forest Guardian reported last week that a Court Hearing was being heard on January 19th.

And that would be, errrm, exactly a week and a half since the owners discovered that their house had been occupied. A decent result for the existing system.

If you want some squatters who we do need to get angry about, try the likes of the Social Centre Plus which occupied the former Job Centre in Deptford High Street in pursuit of opposition to ‘cuts’ last year, and derailed a planned local voluntary project which was planned for the building to benefit the Local Community.

Social Centre Plus was tied up with the extreme left, although presented as ‘non-party political’.

I’d support an amendment to the clause in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offender Bill currently going through Parliament to go beyond current proposals for the criminalisation of squatting in residential buildings. Where projects are underway, or planned in the short term, I’d like to see the concept of Protected Intending Occupier, introduced for residential property in the Criminal Law Act 1977, extended to all buildings.

Leaving the property empty from May, without adequate security, would seem naive. But that does not excuse what appears to be a con & fraud. I hope the Masons can have this resolved quickly. It’s a sad aspect of modern life that there’s a lack of caring or vigilant neighbours (along with no plods on the beat and fewer milk rounds), so empty houses are very vulnerable to this sort of crime – previously someone would notice intruders and “do something”.

In Ilford, where there’s been a rash of this sort of thing, the neighbours have indeed seen the virtue of banding together, keeping an eye on properties and going en masse to public services to demand action.

“This is not squatting. If it was squatting they would not have waved a ‘tenancy agreement’ in front of the people knocking on the door.”

Nonsense. I had exactly the same thing last year with Roma squatters. I was told by police, my barrister & bailiffs that this happens all the time, they just print out a “tenancy agreement” and use that fake document to pretend that “persons unknown” took a rental deposit and a months rent upfront from them. It is standard practice.

I’d have thought that having a fake tenancy agreement would be a weaker position from which to resist eviction that taking a traditional squatting stance, as the owner can disprove the claim on the spot with a doc from the Land Registry and a Driving License to prove the signature, especially if the allegation is that the landlord is someone else.

You’re assuming anyone gives a stuff. No one is interested when this happens. Took me 3 months and thousands of pounds to get a possession order. The another month to get a bailiff appointment. Then, when they still refused to leave, the bailiffs called police to “supervise” (they are not allowed to do anything without police presence). Police claimed to have “no officers available” and so the eviction had to be postponed for another week, so police could be booked and given a weeks notice. What happened? The police called the bailiffs the day before the postponed planned eviction and called it off claiming “we don’t have any officers available” again. On the morning of that day, when the 2nd planned eviction was supposed to take place, there were at least a dozen police officers on a road near the squatted house, checking motorists for insurance, road tax, etc, but none one available to assist bailiffs. The bailiffs (who were very good) told me that they get the same thing all the time.

Eventually, a few days later, the squatters left of their own accord (having, I understand squatted another house a few streets away), but not before, breaking into several houses and cars in the same street, stabbing one of the neighbours, piling rubbish waist high in the garden, generally wreaking the place (including ripping out the copper water tank and thus flooding the downstairs ceilings).

If it happened again I’d just go round there and smash every window in the house, kick the door in, break the toilets, etc to make the place uninhabitable. Doubtless the police would attend for that but it’d probably be quicker and a lot less costly to do it that way.

I cannot for the life of me understand why squatting is not made a criminal act. Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to why, are there factors that are obvious except to me why this is not criminalised.

I’m surprised there are any Moldovan squatters still in London – I got the impression they were all now amongst the many ‘undocumented passengers’ on Italian cruise ships, no doubt providing all manner of ‘incidental services down below’ for officers and for some of the paying-travellers too. Or am I reading too much into the discovery of a few unrecorded, but sadly expired, Eastern European ladies on the Costa Concordia ?

Why weren’t the Masons advised to apply for an Interim Possession Order (IPO)? It’s quick. Then get temporary steel security shuttering – noone ever got past them when I was looking after houses due to be refurbished.

Matt, Unless tenanted, houses are sold “with vacant possession on completion” meaning that they are unoccupied, cleared of the vendor’s possessions and in the condition described in the sale contract. From the Daily Mail it appears that the exchange of contracts stage had not been reached so a prudent conveyancer would advise potential buyers to pause the conveyancing process (and save legal fees) until vacant possession was back on track – no point them taking a punt on a potentially trashed and squatted house in a buyers’ market. I’ve entered houses after squatters have left or been evicted and as well as being the cause of grafitti, damage and littering they are well-named: they use rooms other than the toilet to defecate as a sign of disrepect to the owner.